The immense War Hall of the Court of the Absolute Blade was seething — not with the disciplined clink of steel, but with the chaotic and undignified hum of dozens of rough voices. Elders from the 3rd to the 5th Sub-realm argued harshly around the colossal round stone table. The irritation of having been torn from their furnaces and meditations plagued the air with the acrid smell of stale sweat and ozone.
A solitary warrior of the 6th Sub-realm, Elder Guān, his face carved with the scars of millennia of battles, growled as he crossed his heavy arms. The martial impatience sparked in his irises at the feverish disorganization of his peers. To him, any problem that could not be cleaved was unworthy of a meeting.
At the head of the immense table, completely indifferent to the chaos, the sect leader kept his eyes half-closed, his body relaxed in his obsidian throne. Beside him, Grand Elder Dú Jiàn sighed heavily.
Dú Jiàn, whose Animic Ocean had long since fused with his own blood, simply raised his calloused hand and knocked his index finger knuckle once against the stone surface.
Touc.
A pulse of Sword Intent — invisible, glacial, and absurdly dense — swept through the hall. The oxygen seemed to be cut in half. The temperature plummeted. Silence crashed down instantly, smothering the murmurs and forcing the lesser elders to lock their jaws and curve their spines under the brutal gravity of that authority.
"You dared sound the emergency gong and drag the leader and myself out of our seclusion to look at pieces of paper, Kāng," Dú Jiàn's voice dragged like steel scraping over rock. His bloodshot eyes drove into the Resources Master, who was sweating cold at the opposite end of the table. "Those pillars of this mountain had better be cracking, or your head will roll for making us waste time on merchant dust."
Kāng took a trembling step forward and swallowed hard, bowing his torso deeply, his hands gripping a vast armful of bamboo scrolls so tightly that his knuckles had gone perfectly white from the lack of circulation.
"T-This servant begs forgiveness, Sect Master, Grand Elder," Kāng's dry throat rasped painfully with every syllable. "I know our Dao. I would never dare divert your divine eyes, which seek the martial apex, toward matters of fairs or coins. But... our mountain is not falling, my Lords. It is being smothered without mercy."
Kāng threw the scrolls onto the granite. The dull thud of the rolls echoed like an execution sentence.
"The eastern and northern frontiers have been completely silent for three full days."
Guān scoffed, his cutting aura making the edge of the table crack under his hands.
"Silent?" the 6th stage warrior growled, the vein in his neck pulsing. "Kāng, if the merchant guild vermin aren't sending ore and herb carts because they want to renegotiate tariffs at our door, don't sound the gong! Send the punishment squads! Cut the heads off half a dozen guild leaders, impale their bodies in the village squares, and the convoys will be moving again before nightfall. We didn't need an emergency gong to deal with the greed of filthy rats!"
Kāng pressed both hands on the granite table, his chest heaving frantically to keep from collapsing under the pure hostility radiating from his peers.
"There are no heads to cut, Guān!" Kāng widened his bloodshot eyes, the mathematics of misery shattering his decorum. "Our merchants didn't betray us — they were swallowed! The entire market was strangled all at once. A ghost in the shadows bought absolutely every stock of steel, spiritual ore, and elixirs from the peripheral provinces. They didn't haggle with the fleets. They paid triple, quintuple the listed price! They bled oceans of pure gold just to wipe the shelves of the entire east and north from end to end. And what they couldn't buy legally... was physically pillaged by assassins in the dead of night."
The presumptuous disdain floating through the War Hall died instantly. A simultaneous continental trade blockade would require unfathomable funds and an absolutely perfect assassin's coordination. Nobody silenced an entire continent by accident.
The leader finally opened his eyes on the obsidian throne. The absurd density of his Animic Ocean bent the light around his body, and the air in Kāng's lungs seemed to evaporate, forcing the Elder to instinctively shrink his shoulders under that oppressive mass.
"State our exact limits, Kāng," the leader's voice resonated, low, drawn out, and infinitely lethal, demanding the numbers of ruin itself. "How long do our steel and our blood endure this invisible siege?"
Kāng drew a sharp breath and unrolled the first scroll, the paper stained by the sweat of his fingers.
"Forging ores and metal for sword maintenance are not our immediate bottleneck. As a heavy-blade sect, our catacombs house enough raw ore stock to keep the anvils hot for a full month more," Kāng slid his finger to the second scroll, his voice pitching in pure bureaucratic dread. "But steel does not bleed, Master. Our disciples do."
The old accountant raised his face, the pallor of death dominating his features.
"Our doctrine demands real and savage combat. Our young ones mutilate themselves in the training courtyards daily to forge true Sword Intent. We consume rivers of Healing Pills and Coagulation Elixirs every single day just to keep the next generation from bleeding to death before nightfall."
He slapped his open palm against the table.
"Our medical stock is empty. The spiritual herb warehouses were swept clean as though a plague had descended! If the eastern routes are not reopened by force and the elixirs do not reach our alchemical furnaces immediately... in five days, we will not have a single bandage or drop of coagulant on the entire mountain!"
Kāng pointed across the Hall, driving the undeniable fate home.
"In one week the Court of the Absolute Blade will not fall in battle — we will simply freeze. Our courtyards will fall into funereal silence. The new generation's swords will rust in their sheaths, for no one will be able to train without the risk of bleeding until crippled. They are not starving us to death; they are castrating our Dao through paper!"
The word "castrating" struck the hall's acoustics like an unforgivable offense.
Guān erupted. The silver energy of his 6th Sub-realm cracked the back of his stone chair.
"Castrating our Dao for lack of herbs and roots?!" Guān snarled, his brutal and arrogant mind blinding his logic completely. He slammed his closed fist against the table, making the scrolls leap. "If our disciples cannot bleed in the courtyards, let them bleed the villages! If the guilds and the city dogs cannot sell us the cure, we take it! Assemble the Elite! We march down the mountain at dawn and confiscate what is ours by right of strength!"
But a trembling, defeated sigh cut through the swordsman's bloodthirsty euphoria.
At the far left end of the table, Wèi rose slowly. Tasked with External Diplomacy and the clan's political relations, the 4th Sub-realm cultivator had his embroidered tunic completely soaked in cold sweat. The deep, purple-ringed eye bags betrayed that he had not closed his eyes for nights.
"The arrogance of your blade is useless against an enemy that has no body to be cut, Guān," Wèi's voice rang hollow, devoid of any martial pride.
He didn't walk. He simply pushed three dark jade plates, their inviolability seals broken, toward the Leader.
"There is nothing to confiscate in the valleys. The Shadows Consortium and the Firmament Auction froze every single one of our lines of credit in the early hours of this morning."
Dú Jiàn furrowed his thick white brows, a crease of disbelief marking his forehead.
"Madame Feng dared bar our name from the market?" the old monster growled, teeth clenched. "We are the unquestionable martial foundation of the east. Without our weapons and arrays, her showcase auction loses its luster. She would not have the audacity to ban us without the unanimous backing of the vassal sects!"
Wèi let out a harsh laugh, without a single drop of humor, his dry throat scratching.
"The vassal sects are terrified, Dú Jiàn. I sent spiritual carrier pigeons and encrypted communication arrays to the lesser clans that owe us sworn favors, demanding they open their own coffers to send us elixirs until the market settled."
Wèi pressed his trembling hands on the table, his gaze fixed on the disaster.
"Any lord or patriarch who dared respond to us positively had their own routes mysteriously closed in less than two hours. The Consortium established an unwritten law in the streets: whoever lends a single copper chip to the Court of the Absolute Blade will be banned from continental commerce forever. Our old allies are cutting ties and locking their gates seven times over. They have isolated us diplomatically as though we were lepers before the continent."
The leader leaned his body forward on the obsidian throne.
"A financial and continental blockade of this scale requires an assassin's coordination, but above all, it demands a formidable motive for panic," the leader declared, his voice dropping an oppressive octave. "Why are the other clans obeying these pathetic shadows without fighting back?"
Political terror made Wèi's lips tremble shamefully.
"Because they are not fighting against mercantile asphyxiation, Sect Master. They are fleeing an absolute ghost." Wèi pulled with trembling fingers a crumpled scroll from inside his robes. The hasty, blotted handwriting revealed the high-class gossip network. "The luxury courtesans, the brothel owners, and the most expensive tea houses in the capital began whispering the same legend this past moon. An uncontrollable rumor spread that the Court of the Absolute Blade provoked the fury of an indescribable Ancestral Monster that awoke in the shadows."
Wèi crushed the scroll in his own hand.
"They say our mountain carries the stamp of total obliteration on its back. No one knows what this calamity is. The irrational fear swallowed the logic of alliances. No orthodox lord wants to be associated with our pavilion when this abomination descends from the heavens to tear our heads off. Our name, Master... became synonymous with ashes before a single enemy set foot on our staircase."
On the obsidian throne, the leader's eyes went wide. The pressure of his 7th Sub-realm erupted, cracking the walls and making the embedded swords tremble.
"WHAT A MASSIVE PILE OF COWARDLY MORTAL GARBAGE ARE THESE LORDS?!"
The sect leader's filthy roar exploded like a caged thunderclap, the fury stripping away in a single instant the millennial mask of apathy the man wore. A street mercenary's obscenity tore through the false divinity's throat.
"Fear of a 'Ghost Elder' hiding in the low streets?!" The man on the throne rose, his eyes bloodshot, his aura slicing the oxygen around him. "Are they insane?! Are our Hegemonies not supported by sleeping Ancestors already resting at the unquestionable apex of this world?! Since when does a rumor from drunk whores make the entire continent turn its back on the sharpest blade in the east?!"
Beside the throne, Dú Jiàn drove his calloused, scar-riddled fist against the granite of the round table.
Crack.
A deep and noisy fissure split the solid rock in half, tearing through the logistical scrolls in the process.
"Paper has stained the honor of steel, Sect Master," Dú Jiàn's voice rasped through the hall. "We have spent centuries dictating who breathes and who bleeds. If the guilds, the filthy merchants, and the cities refuse to accept the silver from our coffers for fear of a faceless ghost... then we will not use silver."
Guān opened a grotesque and bloodthirsty grin, beating his scaled chest in enthusiastic approval.
"Swords don't need coins to buy elixirs from cowards," the Grand Elder decreed, his arrogance obliterating political mathematics. "We will not die frozen and smothered in the darkness of our own catacombs. We will march. We will invoke the sacred banner of Orthodox Justice."
Dú Jiàn turned his lethal face toward the remaining elders.
"We will confiscate all necessary medical supplies and metals from the valley cities to 'protect and secure' the population from this false calamity that supposedly threatens the region. And if any clan, merchant guild, or bank resists our pacifying audit... we will treat them summarily as accomplices of the hidden heresy."
The suffocating tension evaporated, immediately replaced by a sadistic, predatory, and bandit-like euphoria, disguised beneath the title of righteous heroes. The Leader nodded, his chest rising and falling, his eyes fixed on his subordinates.
"Gather the elite squads of the intermediate Sub-realms. Descend the staircases before the day is out."
Blind in the unshakable belief that their own blade would cut any commercial tie, not one of the old monsters realized that the decision to march was not a survival strategy — but the perfect closing of the jaws of a merciless trap forged in ink and lotus scent.
---
The wind howled icy and ghostly through the arid walls of the Nightecho Gorge.
The narrow, winding stone trade route that had once served as the primary logistical drainage connecting the foot of the imperial mountain to the frontier cities of the eastern basin was submerged in absolute stillness.
Accelerating through the gray sky a few dozen meters above the ground, Elder Guān led the inspection personally. The 6th Sub-realm monster felt the scar on his face pull with deep irritation. He stopped abruptly in the air and crushed a small jade communication plate between the calluses of his fingers, reducing it to useless green dust.
"Complete silence again!" Guān snarled, his teeth grinding with rage.
The millennial talisman should have connected him instantly to his own vanguard — the elite tactical squads of the 3rd and 4th Sub-realms he had dispatched down the gorge over half a day ago. The artifact was not failing because of distance or topographical interference; the stone was silent because the animic signatures of the recipients had been summarily obliterated from the face of reality.
With his brows furrowed, he landed heavily at the center of the gorge. The sharp, silver aura of his cultivation erupted, sweeping the dust and boulders.
A few meters from him, the three large carts of his squad lay abandoned sideways on the rock. There were no signs of colossal spells. No dismembered corpses or blood trails drawing the dry stone. There was only a dense, heavy, and funereal abandonment beneath the shadows of the tall rock formations.
"What manner of demon vermin dares cut down the dogs of the Absolute Blade without a battle cry and hides like rats in the shadows?!" the old warrior's voice thundered through the canyon, projected by pure Qi, making small debris crack and tumble from the gorge walls. "Show yourselves!"
The thickest shadows beneath the curvature of the rocks oscillated like pools of living ink. Without emitting a single scrape of footsteps or sound of breathing, four figures emerged from the dense darkness. The men wore black leather armor absolutely molded to their muscles, their faces entirely hidden by blank, expressionless opaque masks. They bore no orthodox sect crests swaying in the wind and carried no immense, gleaming flying swords. They were pure slaughter utility. Perfect, silent assassins of the Twin Shadows Syndicate.
Guān narrowed his scarred eyes. The veteran warrior's sharpened martial perception swept the group instantly. The death grip freezing his chest evaporated, replaced by a hoarse, guttural, and incredibly arrogant laugh that echoed through the gorge.
"The Grinding? You are settled in the 4th Sub-realm?" Guān spat a ball of phlegm and saliva onto the dry stone, resting his sword on his shoulder. "Filthy alley thieves who drowned their own souls in blood and think they can challenge the unbreakable weight of steel. I am a monster seated in the 6th Stage! The density gap between us is an astronomical abyss that you cannot cross in a thousand years. I will slice your soft flesh and grind your bones until nothing remains but fetid dust."
The four masked assassins did not take the bait. They delivered no long speeches or cried out the name of any false master.
Three of them simply bent their knees simultaneously. Space blinked. They launched from complete stillness into a lethal black blur, short and absurdly sharp daggers appearing in their hands in perfect predatory coordination.
"Pathetic! Blind dogs!" the elder howled.
Guān drew his heavy broadsword from his shoulder. The silver energy exploded violently, condensing a colossal lethality along the entire edge of the blade. He planted his boots, locked his hips, and unleashed a destructive horizontal arc, perfectly projected to slice the three assassins in half and carve a gash into the gorge itself as a bonus. The wave of kinetic force tore the wind with a dense and deafening whistle.
The frontal collision was direct and undeniable. But the sound that echoed through the narrow passage was not that of soft flesh being split into bloody pieces.
THUD!
It was a massive, dry, and hollow impact — similar to that of an ancestral hammer striking the unbreakable flank of a mountain of solid lead.
The three assassins did not attempt to dodge the era-crossing blow. They advanced directly into the steel's reach and crossed their own bare forearms — sheathed in thin leather — to block the impact of the flying guillotine. The blade's crushing force cracked the stones beneath the men in black's feet, dragging them two meters back through the dust, but the unparalleled edge of the 6th Sub-realm barely managed to open a shallow, pitiful cut in the skin of their arms. The dark blood that began to drip on the stones did not yield to the brute force.
Guān's jaw dropped. The old swordsman's eyes nearly burst from their sockets, his mortal brain entering complete collapse before the surgical impossibility of that physics.
What the scarred-face veteran ignored — and what the cultivation world would only discover by eating its own dirt — was that the dogs of that new underworld no longer cultivated the sterile, worn-out Qi of the Golden Age. The cells, bones, and muscles of those four assassins had been rewritten and hyper-densified from the inside out by the merciless drop of Primordial Qi that Zhì Yuǎn had implanted in them in the capital. On the tattered paper of statistics, they might have registered as the 4th Sub-realm; but their calloused flesh weighed and endured the impact of the purest cosmic rock.
"Impossible..." Guān choked, his muscular arms trembling violently under the resistance of his own heavy sword pinned against their skin. "What cursed biological density is this?!"
Taking advantage of the veteran's lethargic shock, the battle engaged. The three assassins rotated their wrists, the Syndicate's daggers stitching through the elder's loose defense in a suffocating, swift, and clinical rhythm that forced him to retreat terrified steps backward, howling in pure panic before the inexhaustible weight of those "lesser rats."
At the back of the passage, thirty meters from the cloud of dust and grinding steel, the fourth assassin remained untouched in the gorge's shadows.
Raising his left hand, he pressed his fingers directly over his own chest, focused with millimetric precision on the golden and invisible mark that cemented the cosmic collar governing him.
The assassin activated the ability engraved by his Master. The thread ignored the restrictions of mountains, runic arrays, and dimensions, sending a single and silent pulse of need directly into the abyss.
"The situation has grown complicated, my Lord. We require more power."
The response to the call was not telegraphed by thundering clouds or majestic voices. The calamity that answered the summons was announced by nothing but an irreversible fracture of space.
A mere ten steps from Elder Guān, the furious wind of the Nightecho Gorge lost its force and froze. The air of the rocky passage snapped like a spine splitting in two.
RIIIIIP.
The three-dimensional fabric of the world folded and tore violently with the dense and guttural sound of thick silk being eviscerated by invisible claws. A chaotic dimensional rift, filled with the pitch of the vacuum and outlined by pure silver light, split wide open in the middle of the bloodied gravel. The smell of old dust was buried under a thick tide of ozone, sandalwood, and the carnal musk of Yin.
Guān froze. The three Syndicate assassins retreated simultaneously, their swift movements breaking sync as they dropped to both knees on the jagged stone, bowing in silent and terrified reverence.
A perfectly smooth and bare heel, gleaming with the lethal vitality of the universe, stepped heavily onto nothing.
Yù Méi emerged from the spatial rift, her white sole striking the gravel with a damp crack of intent. The youngest wore her golden silk tunic, split audaciously at the thick thighs that marked her brutal physique.
The Brutal Blade stretched herself at length, her back arching upward and her long arms cracking the tense knots under the dead sky. Yù Méi's pupils were frighteningly dilated, intoxicated by the carnal and lethal ecstasy of her husband's body that she had just been torn away from.
For the devoted youngest, that brutal friction in bed was the only anchor that kept the girl from destroying the entire continent in a surge of aggression. But now, ripped out from beneath him by the call, the gears of her hyper-active Dantian desperately demanded a release valve to discharge the colossal heat that his Yang had left locked inside her muscles.
And breaking mortal bones seemed like an utterly lovely palliative.
The dimensional rift swallowed the residual light and collapsed violently behind the girl with a dry snap, turning the Nightecho Gorge into a coffin sealed seven times over.
A wide, carnivorous grin adorned by sharp canines split Yù Méi's immaculate and divine features.
"Finally, by my heaven... one damn backbone that doesn't turn to filthy mush just from me breathing nearby!" the Brutal Blade's guttural, husky voice hissed through the air, a low note of pure promise of slaughter filling the gorge. She tilted her head to the side, the crack of her neck reverberating off the stone walls. Her gold-forged irises fixed on Guān's shrunken figure. "Let's see how long that garbage steel of yours holds before I rip your trachea out through your mouth and shove it back down your own throat, old man."